The Iceberg Theory
by Dana Janeway
Summary: One-shot, short retelling of the ending of "Tourmaline" from Alex's point of view. Note: will probably not make much sense if you have not read "Tourmaline."


___The Iceberg Theory_

Walk with purpose, even if you have no idea where you're going. Hold your head high. Let the chaos in your past fade away, and remind yourself that there is beauty in everything.

Or at least, for heaven's sake, try.

It was the coldest winter in years. There is nothing I hate more than sensible winter boots without heels but lord help me, I was wearing them. I was an impatient pedestrian, staring down the light and willing it to change, gripping my coffee in both hands.

It didn't taste the same. Nothing did. Nothing looked the same either. Everything was greyer, duller, and less interesting than it had been before. The Christmas lights that still remained on the lampposts, the early-morning drivers with their headlights on, the blanket of snow on the cold ground. The taste of coffee, bitter and never really able to keep me awake.

I was working on an appeals case involving an NGRI conviction that my team was hoping to overturn. It was a case that ordinarily would have made my blood boil, some sonofabitch who murdered his family and got a psychiatrist to testify that he had had a brief psychotic episode.

But at a time when I needed my wits about me, at a time when all of my concentration and focus were required to right a hideous wrong, I found myself impatient, out of sorts and distracted. My files were a pathetic mess, I studied all the wrong precedents and threw out all sorts of pertinent information.

Despite which, my colleague on this case, an upstart trial lawyer from Pennsylvania in his late twenties, still saw fit to ask me out for dinner.

I had already declined politely, or perhaps not so politely, but I kept his message on my phone and listened to it again. I listened to the quality of his voice, at once nervous and hopeful, and it made me terribly sad.

That sweet sound; half bold, half despairing... Why in the world couldn't she have ever said my name like that? Why couldn't she have said _anything_?

Hello. How's the weather. Did you see the Knicks game on cable. Why is filter coffee so overpriced. I love you and I want to be with you forever.

We may not all be poets, but each one of us in our individual lifetimes will imagine unique combinations of words and string them together. Leave it to the woman I was in love with to prefer silence.

I wasn't really angry with her, because I didn't think it was fair to expect her to communicate. She had made it clear enough that she couldn't. But I was furious with myself. I had lost my usually guarded heart to someone who had, for lack of any better explanation, simply needed a night of comfort for all the horrors she had experienced. Who at this very moment was most likely asleep in the arms of her boyfriend.

True love lets go. True love is that force of nature that allows us to carry on with out lives, despite having lost something irreplaceable.

I felt as if the light were changing forever, as if it never really went from red to green, but stayed somewhere in the middle. It was seven in the morning, the sun just up, tearing through the night sky like scissors ruining dark fabric.

I had decided to bury myself in paperwork, which I did, all morning, as inefficiently as ever, but I relished the quiet of the small borrowed office with its library smell and tall books arranged in alphabetical order. I stayed out of everyone's way, I couldn't be sociable. It was hard enough to read, but at least I didn't feel obligated to smile at the page and make small talk with it.

Brief psychosis.

I didn't need a book to tell me what that meant. It meant her arms around me, her unspeakably beautiful brown eyes locked with mine, and that absolutely meaningless promise her touch conveyed. She had made me feel that night that there was a reason for everything. The whole world made perfect sense for a few hours, and if that wasn't psychotic….

Maybe I could have learned to see it as some kind of joint struggle, a moment when we had both needed to lose contact with reality. Auditory and visual hallucinations, delusions. The way she watched me, the way she stared when the straps of my dress fell over my shoulders. The way her eyes bore into my shoulder blades and my back when she unzipped my dress all the way. She could have made me do anything she wanted. I would never feel anything like that again.

An altered state of being; an illness, or an escape. Rarely an excuse for violence, but all too often an excuse for its opposite.

Oh God, was I going to become a bitter middle-aged woman with severe glasses who looked coldly down at everyone and never smiled all because of Olivia Benson?

I picked up the office phone with an unsteady hand.

"Assistant Attorney General's office, this is Cabot."

"There's an Olivia Benson here to see you."

I lifted the receiver slightly away from my ear, and stared at it in disbelief. Somehow, it had become three in the afternoon. Somehow the number of Starbucks paper coffee cups on the desk had tripled. I looked at my trial notes, and my own handwriting made no sense to me. Since when had it tilted to the left like that?

I wanted to repeat my disorganized thoughts into the receiver, or else just hang up, but on some level I managed to shake myself awake, and I told poor Lorraine downstairs with as much composure as possible to send her up.

I thought that perhaps I had willed her into coming all the way down here just by virtue of having thought about nothing else for the past eight hours. I was on the very edge of panic, and I realized that as horribly distraught and hurt as I had been, I actually wasn't ready to see her and had no idea what to say.

Maybe she knew. Maybe she knew enough that when she saw me, she would just hold me the way she had that night, and look at me the same way – well, maybe not exactly the same way but some subdued version of that way. My heart pounding, I opened the office door and stood in the doorframe waiting for the elevator. I watched her step out of it and walk hesitantly down the hallway. She was wearing jeans, a tight t-shirt and a faded jacket, and her hair was pulled back in a lopsided ponytail. She had circles under her eyes and she looked a complete mess, and I had never loved her so much.

"Olivia."

She turned to look in my direction.

"Hi."

"Hi."

Just like that I belonged to her again. Just like that, I would have done anything in the world she asked of me.

But she didn't say anything else, and she made it clear that she wasn't about to. I turned away, and walked back into the office and stared out the window, and to my astonishment I began to cry. I was furious with myself for being so weak, and so I became furious with her, even though I wasn't, not really. But it felt so undeniably wonderful to yell at her when she asked me if I was all right. To misinterpret everything she said and make her feel as if everything was her fault. And then she told me she didn't think I would have cared enough to be as upset as I was. She didn't think I would have _cared_? I wanted to kill her, but settled for an army of vitriolic one-liners.

"If you came all the way out here to tell me that you and Brian –"

"We aren't going to be seeing each other anymore."

I opened my eyes, and she handed me a sorrowful-looking piece of paper, and asked me to read it.

Which I did, once, twice, three times. What struck me was not so much what was written, but the fact that the effort it had taken her to write this to me was evident all over the page. Scratches and corrections, and letters traced over and over so that in the end she was left with exactly what she meant to say, and nothing else.

It was something I would not have been brave enough to do. Coming up with words is easy enough, as long as you don't care how true they are, and I realized how much I had misjudged her. I had never considered the possibility that she might just have been a Hemingway.

My Olivia, a Hemingway.

"Alex, before you say anything – I just want you to know that I'm not asking you to forgive me, or to feel the way I feel, or anything like that. You don't even have to say anything now if you don't want to, I just wanted you to read it, and I can go, and then we can –"

"Olivia."

"Yes?"

"Shut up," I said, with no doubt in my truthfulness, and then I gave her lips something else to do.


End file.
